


this incurable hemophilia

by twelvemagpies



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate/Missing Scene, Canon-Typical Violence, Grief/Mourning, andy's appreciation of irony is less well-honed than her melee skills, booker wins one (1) argument and regrets it immediately, joe is just having an all-around world-class bad time, nile is the audience participation portion of a modern greek tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:27:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25600588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twelvemagpies/pseuds/twelvemagpies
Summary: They'dbeenthere when the term "red herring" was invented, and it still gets them all the same.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 33
Kudos: 245





	this incurable hemophilia

**Author's Note:**

> this clattered out of my head on friday and it came about, as many of my terrible ideas do, from me skidding into a friend's dms and going "hey wanna hear something fucked up? what if—"
> 
> title is taken from a line in david mitchell's _slade house:_ "grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed."

**andy**

Her team comes skidding around the corner just as Andy idly debates kicking Merrick's crony one more time, just for good measure and a little bit of catharsis. Instead she stoops to pick the fire axe up from where it'd skittered to a stop, groaning as her entire body riots from something as simple as fucking _bending over,_ and spares the most grudging iota of respect, fighter to fighter, for a bastard cocky enough to kick at a swinging axe.

Digging her fingers into the muscle of her shoulder (where she already knows there’ll be one hell of a sore spot tomorrow, nearly seven thousand years later her body still remembers what it feels like the morning after an ass-kicking), Andy turns to look at Nile and Booker, to look at _just_ Nile and Booker—and then she hears it.

It makes them all jump, rattling the walls in the eerie silence of the lab now that there's no one left alive to shoot at them, echoing even louder than the ringing in Andy's ears. Nile’s head whips around back the way they came, gun already swinging up to cover them. Booker doesn't turn. His eyes don't quite meet Andy's before he shuts them, the tired lines of his face creasing with devastating resignation.

For one uncanny moment she’s back in Sudan, trapped in a cold dark room and missing the bigger picture. A motherfucking bait-and-switch all over again: she’s learning some bullshit cosmic lesson about mortality too late to put any of it to good use, Booker’s never actually _stopped_ trying to die since the very first time, not really, and she’d said it herself, Nile’s too _new—_

First, Andy lost Qunyh because she was so hellbent on the good of humanity that she’d forgotten people's capacity for casual cruelty. Now, Joe is _screaming_ somewhere behind her, a desperate, excruciating animal sound that she remembers carrying the weight of in her own mouth, because she was so focused on the certainty of death that she forgot all about its endless capacity for irony.

She's been here so many times before, the same question over and over again and this time—a different answer. The same fucking ending.

**nile**

Nile has seen famine, and cruelty, and hopeless tragedy that carves chunks out of people like snapped-off pieces of care-package chocolate bars. She's felt mortars shake the ground under her feet and set her heartbeat tripping over itself until her whole body is one giant throb, a nerve raw and exposed, but— 

But she's _never_ heard another human being make a sound like that before.

**booker**

He'd thought, so briefly, some small quixotic voice in the back of his head that in his more maudlin moments he thinks might be God, a voice that always, always sounds like Jean-Pierre—he'd thought maybe _he_ might die here. Might die for the team as a pittance of a penance, because wouldn't that be a story? He'd buy that book, tell that fable to his sons before bed like a rosary against the monsters at the door: _here is a man, here is a coward lonely and afraid and he has nothing left to give, nothing but himself body-and-soul, flesh-and-blood-and-bone and in the end he gives it up for them anyway—_

As they pick themselves up and scramble after Andy—who’s already stormed off through the carnage like death itself, fire axe gripped loosely in the cradle of her fingers almost like an afterthought—Booker spares a moment to wonder where Joe and Nicky are, if they’re alright. But for a moment, only, because of course they are; if they're together, Joe-and-Nicky, they're unstoppable. The very idea of them somehow separated feels unfathomable. What a silly, unnatural thing that would be to think of at all. 

Except in the end, it’s practically textbook. Booker’s forged enough fairytales, told enough tall tales of his own to know how to follow this trail, twist this plot: _I believe it’s because we’re meant to find each other,_ Nicky had said, talking to Nile but looking at Joe, and Booker wouldn't have needed to check to know their legs were tangled together under the table. Even sat across from one another they were always side by side.

_“What would you know of the weight of all these years alone? You and Nicky always had each other, right?”_

Sébastien le Livre has eaten enough crow in his life. He's choked down enough empty promises and fruitless predictions and yet even when he plays prophet, when for _once_ he reads aloud the writing on the wall, it turns out that in his mouth it all still tastes like blood anyway.

**joe**

His hands shake as he cradles Nicky's face between his palms, kneeling curled over Nicky's body—and that's all it is now, a _body,_ it's been minutes and there's a corpse wearing Nicky's face in Joe's lap—back bowed with a grief that feels so much more like rage blistering white-hot down his spine, _wailing_ so loudly his voice echoes back to him a thousandfold, an army of shrieking anguish. Except, it's too raw to be called wailing. The sound that drags out of him is from the pit of his belly, dug-in deep with claws that rip and tear the whole way up through teeth clenched so hard they crack like porcelain.

That had been his specialty once, porcelain. Learning to reproduce the precious technique so popular in the east, to cut and colour and shape the ceramic into coveted things, bowls and bottles and mosaic tiles. He'd always had such steady hands; artisan's hands, warrior's hands. _Lover's hands,_ Nicky had murmured once, wry and smiling, _to make such wonderful things with such care._ Hands that had fit together tiles so closely it's like they'd never been cleaved apart, sketched parallel lines with such unerring precision that it drew patrons from far across the city. Steady hands that eventually drew soldiers and men of God to him too, who'd coveted his skills and turned them towards a different sort of creation— 

(He and Nicky were parallel lines, Joe had thought, were walking paths stretching side-by-side from here to whatever comes next. But therein lies the problem with hands that shake, with lines that _aren’t_ parallel, are only _nearly:_ you never see the truth of them until you're long past the only point they'll ever intersect.)

Joe's done many things in the name of a god, things he never thought he would—but in Nicolò's name, for _Nicky,_ there is no wretched thing he _wouldn't—_

So later, when he murmurs, "You shot Nicky. You shouldn't have done that," he kills Keane with hands that do not shake at all.

**nicky**

He hears Joe yell something over the cocking of Keane's gun and he thinks, _Allora, I hope it will be quick this time—_

**Author's Note:**

> every other thing i've been working on lately is turning into a fucking saga (both literally and emotionally), so i needed to prove to myself that i could write something shorter and punchy lmao! and idk if this is all the old guard fic i’ve got in me or not, but i think i mostly succeeded
> 
> also a couple quick notes just to clear things up: i couldn't help the gratuitous math bc i'm a asshole who's doing calculus for fun again, and by definition two straight lines that aren't parallel will intersect at one point before continuing infinitely away from one another in either direction
> 
> and _allora_ is literally "then" in italian, but in conversation it can be used as a segue word, like saying "well then", "alright then" (i almost didn't write it but hearing it said in the movie unlocked my Deep Memories of speaking italian regularly enough that _allora_ specifically started bleeding into my other languages lmao)


End file.
